it's a of course a very vexing issue because people who believe devoutly in religion will tell you that there's no question there it's already answered which is that we're obligated to respect and believe and follow the word of God however that word is determined I did with a colleague of mine who had been at the UCLA Medical School head of the psychiatric Research Institute Michael Maguire a book called God's brain in which we were I think able to suggest if not demonstrate that religion is really made by the brain it's a secretion of the brain
and this gets us away from the issue of whether religion is true or not true the fact is that there are 4200 religions in the world each of them believing that they're absolutely correct and everyone should follow their views and some 90% of the human beings are uh describable by themselves if not others as religious so we're not dealing here with a casual casual phenomenon even though no one has any evidence of the stories behind the religions and so we got interested in this massive unreality which is in fact finally a real reality Nam namely
religions and so there are Cathedrals and towns there are tax exemptions there are people uh donating money to religion still in America uh religions receive more donations than any other part of the community and so we were fascinated with what animated this and as I said I think we were able to suggest if not also demonstrate that the brain creates religion and the brain consumes religion yes that that's the argument that Michael Maguire uh discerned in the uh matter of Serotonin he discovered that serotonin in primates was associated with high status and that when animals
had high status they felt better it's not unreasonable if you took away their High St stus their serotonin levels would crash their brains would begin producing more C cortisol and other neurotransmitters that are associated with feeling mean and feeling bad and feeling low and so we decided that one of the ways of looking at religion is to what extent and how does it generate the serot serot no jeric uh uh juices that make us feel good hence you go to a mass in a major Cathedral or anywhere or a slum Baptist Church and there's music
and there's color and there's activity and it appears that people actually get some brain juice out of it and that brain juice again self-created and self-consumed is the uh story we think of religion well there's an argument about Europe which has tended in the Years recent years to become less formally religious so the French for example rarely go to to mass uh there are certain fictional religious observances but they don't really abide by it on the other hand they're the uh most enthusiastic pill poppers in Europe and it may be that they're taking the mass
into their skull with a pill so there is the pharmacological element of brain soothing let me just back up for a second what we described was a kind of males of the brain we call Brain pain that's when you're late for work when you you're driving somewhere vital and you get a flat tire uh you're working with somebody who's a certified you have brain pain and everybody has that it's in the nature of the human brain to observe to seek out and to uh conjure up problems evaluate the environment in contrast we suggested that one
of the things that religions do is provide brain soothing they they soothe the brain the way a spa does or a massage or exercise or going for a walk in the park and so uh there is a kind of uh bracket here between brain pain brain soothe and religion may be one of the main producers of the brain soothing uh phenomenon in a way that's not that expensive or destructive or difficult all you have to do is show up Sunday morning
